In order to preserve the identity and privacy of the editing community, we have made several modifications to the dataset. 
1.	First off, we removed all the open-ended responses from the data. For instance, the text portions of all the “Other, please specify:” sections associated with some questions (one example: D6b_TEXT: “Why are you not a member of the local Wikimedia Chapter?”) were removed from the data.
2.	Some users chose to provide us with their e-mail addresses. This column was removed.
3.	For the purposes of our analysis, we had included actual user data: lifetime edits, joining year etc. This was excluded from the dataset.
4.	To understand any inappropriate experiences our female editors may have faced, we asked about these in Q16. To protect their privacy, this information was removed.
5.  Answers indicating an age of 18 years, or younger than that, were grouped together with the common value of "18 or below".
6.	Also, we removed the column describing the response's start date, end date, response set, and status, as it wasn’t relevant.
After these basic checks, we took a series of steps to ensure the privacy of minorities – geographic, language as well as gender. Due to their relatively smaller numbers, we wanted to make sure that their identities could not be easily deciphered. 
For Country of residence (D5), the primary languages question (D7), the Wikipedia contribution languages questions (Q1a, Q1b), as well as the reading languages questions (Q2a, Q2b):
1.	If the total number of entries for a single response (for instance, a single country) was less than 26, all those entries were set to “other”.
2.	Next, if the number of entries by women were less than 11, all those entries were set to “other”.
3.	Due to their extremely small numbers, entries for transsexuals and transgenders were set to “other”.
(See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Editors_Survey_November_2011 for general information about this survey)